North Korea publicly painted a nuclear target on Australia in April 2017. Kim Jong-un's regime seized on the fact that a contingent of US marines is now in a permanent, rotating deployment in the Northern Territory.

Specifically, the regime's main mouthpiece, the official party newspaper Rodong Sinmun, said: “If Australia persists in following the US moves to isolate and stifle the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] and remains a shock brigade of the US master, this will be a suicidal act of coming within the range of the nuclear strike of the strategic force of the DPRK.”

With all the excited talk of Donald Trump's two meetings with Kim in June and again last week, has anything changed?

Give Trump credit for two things. First, he said plainly what everyone could see but the US government had never actually admitted. That all earlier US attempts to deal with North Korea's nuclear weapons program had failed. The Obama administration's policy of so-called "strategic patience" was merely strategic inaction. Documents on the policy should have been stripped of the government logo featuring the American eagle and badged with an ostrich instead. Trump tried something different.

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Second, Trump might have got carried away for a minute – "we fell in love" he said of his first meeting with Kim – but he did break the cycle of escalation. Neither side is currently moving to open warfare; a year ago, both appeared to be. Imminent threat has abated. With it, any imminent threat to Australia also has abated. "I don't think threatening Australia is at the top of the Kim wishlist at the moment," says the head of La Trobe Asia, North Korea expert Euan Graham. "He's in full diplomatic outreach mode at the moment."

But what about the underlying danger? Kim still has all the nuclear warheads that he had before he first sat down with Trump, and the missiles with which to deliver them. Indeed, he very likely has more. And he very likely continues to build more bombs and more missiles.

Illustration: Dionne Gain

In last week's talks with Trump, Kim offered to dismantle part of North Korea's most famous nuclear facility, Yongbyon. In exchange, he wanted the US to remove five of the 11 sanctions packages imposed on it by the UN Security Council. These are all of the "meaningful" sanctions choking the North Korean economy, according to a sanctions expert at America's Stimson Centre, Benjamin Silberstein.

Theses sanctions include banning the sale to North Korea of any metals, raw materials, coal, refined and unrefined petroleum, transport goods, and much more. Just about everything except for arms.

So why didn't Trump accept the deal? Why let the summit break up without agreement? A senior US official travelling with Trump gave a background briefing to American reporters after the talks fell apart. He could be quoted but not named. He explained: "The dilemma that we were confronted with is the North Koreans at this point are unwilling to impose a complete freeze on their weapons of mass destruction programs

"So to give many, many billions of dollars in sanctions relief would in effect put us in a position of subsidising the ongoing development of weapons of mass destruction in North Korea."

US President Donald Trump pictured with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, in Hanoi last week. Credit:AP

So North Korea was prepared to dismantle part of one nuclear facility, but not the rest of its nuclear infrastructure. And it wanted to keep building new nukes and missiles in the meantime. Further, it would be able to do this with fresh infusions of cash and materials as it legitimately rejoined the world trading system.

Of course Trump had to refuse this request from a rogue state targeting his country and his allies with illegal nukes. Gratefully, he did. Trump even let Kim know that the US had discovered some of his covert nuclear facilities.

Kim is still building new weapons capability by the day, regardless. But he doesn't have access to the international trading system, so the logic is that his regime eventually will be starved into submission. So it's just a matter of waiting for Kim to submit, right?

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Not so fast. For a country supposedly sealed off to the world trading system, North Korea isn't looking too bad lately, according to a variety of reports. The Wall Street Journal last week reported that "rice prices have remained stable, and gasoline prices, which rose after sanctions were tightened, have fallen significantly from highs in the fall of 2017", based on evidence from three dozen visitors to return from North Korea, including officials, humanitarian workers and defectors.

But hold on. Gasoline, or petroleum, is one of the strategic commodities banned under the sanctions. Yet the price has fallen since sanctions were imposed?

The Journal reported that there was something of a construction boom under way in the capital, Pyongyang. And: "Several visitors to Pyongyang and a few other major cities said they even observed some improvements in daily life, including more electricity and cheaper coal, which makes it easier to heat homes."

Illustration: Andrew Dyson

How could this be so? Only if there is a crack in the sanctions dyke. A former US negotiator with North Korea, David Asher of the Centre for a New American Security in Washington, says that the crack has a name – China.

"The big problem is that China is doing virtually nothing in the way of active sanctions and they are abetting North Korea's nuclear program, based on their own trade data. They say they shut 75 China-North Korea joint ventures, but their own data shows none has been shut down and several have been added just in the last six months."

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Multiple Chinese enterprises are working with Pyongyang despite the sanctions, he says. These include Dalian Baoyuan Nuclear Equipment Co. and its subsidiary, Limac Corporation, according to a report published in August by specialised data analytics firm, Sayari Analytics in Washington. Limac is involved in supplying the Chinese navy's weapons programs.

So on this evidence, while the US is leading an effort to starve Kim's regime into disarming, China is quietly keeping it supplied with essential items and actually helping its nuclear capability.

So for Australia, we shouldn't expect any quick North Korean denuclearisation. And as La Trobe Asia's Graham concludes: "We have to look at their capability as well as their intentions."

So at the moment Kim's intentions don't look hostile. But, says Graham: "On the capability side, a concentric circle is a concentric circle - if they are on the threshold of ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] capability, then yes, Australia's military and others have to take it seriously in terms of missile defence or anything else." Australia must consider itself a potential target. Still.